Howdy everyone. We executed the night landing in Zihuatanejo around 1am, anchored at the edge of the pack, and promptly sacked out. Pretty much everyone is on the move lately and the typically popular anchorage has only twelve boats. Lots of space! We’ll take advantage and move the boat three or four times in our attempt to find the most advantageous internet position. (We’re on move number two and it’s coming in fairly well, thanks.) Currently we are getting buzzed by the parasailers; it’s a small bay.

Our little overnighter from Manzanillo turned into a two and a halfer due to some whacked wind (if there was wind) coming out of the direction we wanted to go coupled with opposing swell.

Yesterday, things got interesting when a juvenile brown booby landed on deck. We were maybe 15 miles offshore and perhaps 40 miles from Zihuatanejo. He (we actually don’t know if it was a male or female—the plumage on the young ones is uniformly brown) was predominantly unconcerned by us and after checking us out a bit, he settled in and started a preening binge that lasted a good five hours. Nearing dusk, some packs of boobies flew by and he regarded the first group with mild interest but did not join them. Following groups were totally ignored. (Suckers!) At dark, he situated himself on the forward ama edge, tail pointed overboard, tucked his head into his wing and went to sleep. It’s really impressive how birds can sleep standing on an unstable surface. The only point where he looked in danger of falling overboard was when he raised one leg to scratch his ear and the boat lurched suddenly; he ruffled his feathers and gave us the eye as we laughed at him. During the night a group of dolphins surrounded the boat and woke the booby. He kind of flipped out a bit and stamped around flapping his wings. When he settled down he relocated to a spot solidly on deck with no parts hanging over. He barely woke up for our arrival in Zihuatanejo and only squawked with irritation when I had to shoo him out of the way to get the anchor bridle situated. The next morning he was gone. Sigh, empty nest syndrome!

Boob on deck.

In fishing news, we caught a sierra, which was promptly made into tacos; then a bit later we caught a very large fish. We were unable to identify it due to a conspicuous lack of any useful fish identifying books. It was heavy though and remained very still and made a croaking sound as we removed the hook (we let it go because we didn’t have any ice and didn’t know what it was). Then we caught another something something that was so large and feisty that it managed to strip out all the screws from the inside of the reel and get away just as we were getting it close enough to the boat that we might actually catch a glimpse. The reel is out of commission until Joshua can find some sort of diagram of the innards.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 29th, 2006 at 12:08 pm and is filed under doings, Mexico, nature, TimeMachine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.